Tag Archives: Contract With America

local news, political news, State news

Entering crucial stage of midterm campaign

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. A “wave election” occurs when the least likely incumbent takes a fall, signaling a dramatic change in fortunes for the halls of Congress.

In 1994, I had a ringside seat for one of those events. Longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Jack Brooks of Beaumont represented one of Texas’s last Democratic bastions in the Golden Triangle. He’d been in Congress for more than four decades. His foe that year was a guy who came out of nowhere.

Steve Stockman shocked the political world by beating the late “Sweet Ol’ Brooks” to take his House seat as part of the Contract With America GOP delegation.

I figured at the time if Brooks was to lose, the entire House was going to flip. Sure enough. He did. The House did flip.

Stockman lasted one term before being defeated for re-election in 1996. He was elected again much later, but then lost again after another single term. He’s now facing prison time for fraud.

Fast-forward to the present day. Texas’s U.S. Senate seat is in play. Democrat Beto O’Rourke is trying to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a state that is as Republican as it gets.

The way I figure it today, if somehow O’Rourke manages to pull off what looks like the Upset of the Ages, then the U.S. Senate stands a good chance of flipping from Republican to Democratic control.

It’s a steep hill for the El Paso congressman. He trails the Cruz Missile. But not by much. I see polls that swing from 2 points to 8 points. Cruz should — by standard political measures — be way up. He’s not.

O’Rourke well might lose on Nov. 6. I don’t want him or his allies to claim some sort of “moral victory” by making it close. A loss is a loss. For my money, Cruz needs to lose. He might represent a lot of Texans’ values. He doesn’t represent mine.

If the Cruz Missile gets blown out of the sky, then I am betting that the entire Senate turns over.

Believe me, stranger things have happened — just as it did in the Golden Triangle all those years ago.

national news

‘Democrat’ is a noun, not an adjective

Why do conservatives — chiefly Republicans — continue to use the term “Democrat” in a way that some listeners, such as me, find vaguely insulting?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders today has used the term “Democrat” as an adjective. She refers to “Democrat members of Congress” who, of course, do things that Republicans dislike.

OK, this can be seen as a silly point. I don’t see it that way.

Republicans began using “Democrat” as an adjective when Republican U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich launched the Contact With American campaign to take control of Congress in 1994.

They ceased referring to members of the other party as being “Democratic” lawmakers. They say “Democrat” because it’s jarring to the ear in ways that are a bit difficult to explain. Plus, they no doubt view their colleagues on the other side as anything but “democratic” in their world view.

Thus, this new use of a long-standing word has taken root. It’s deeper than ever in this divisive period in our political history.

And, oh yes. It still rankles me.

State news

Ex-congressman faces a possible prison term

I would feel a hint of compassion for a former congressman.

Except that I cannot.

Steve Stockman once was a Republican member of the House of Representatives. He served two non-consecutive terms. He now faces a possible decades-long prison sentence if a jury convicts him of mail and wire fraud, money laundering and election law violations.

He allegedly treated himself to lots of campaign cash, not to mention using it to pay for non-political related expenses for staffers and family members.

I don’t know whether he’s guilty of the charges brought against him. That will determined by a Houston-area jury. I do know of Stockman as one of the strangest politicians I’ve ever encountered.

He first won election to the House in 1994 as part of the GOP Contract With America tidal wave. He managed to sweep from Congress a powerful Democratic committee chairman, Jack Brooks of Beaumont, who at the time was the senior member of the Texas congressional delegation. Brooks chaired the House Judiciary Committee when he lost to Stockman — who knew next to nothing about the congressional district he represented for two years.

He most recently invited the angry man of rock ‘n roll music, Ted Nugent, to attend President Obama’s State of the Union speech in 2013; that occurred during Stockman’s second term in the House.

He didn’t distinguish himself at all during his time in the House. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014, but lost to incumbent John Cornyn in the GOP primary.

Stockman was a goofball while he served in the House. As the Texas Tribune reported, Stockman once had a bumper sticker printed that read: ā€œIf babies had guns they wouldnā€™t be aborted.ā€

Doesn’t this jokester just crack you up? Naw, me neither.

Well,Ā  I’ll await his verdict and I might offer a comment when the jury delivers it.

I would wish him well, if only he had learned how to behave himself while he served in the People’s House.

national news, political news

Let us revisit ‘term limits’

The calls for mandating term limits for members of the U.S. House and Senate have become a bit muted in recent years.

That’s fine with me. I’ve never quite understood the notion of requiring public servants to step aside after a certain set time established through federal statute or constitutional amendment.

The issue keeps recurring every so often. It well might again in the 2018 midterm election that will decide every one of 435 U.S. House seats and one-third of the seats in the 100-member U.S. Senate.

I dug up a 2013 article in USA Today that noted that the 113th Congress was the most “inexperienced” in nearly two decades.

As USA Today noted about that Congress:Ā A confluence of factors ā€” from a trio of wave elections, redistricting, divisive primaries to even death ā€” kick off a 113th Congress populated by junior lawmakers in both chambers that challenges the conventional wisdom that Washington politics is dominated by entrenched incumbents.

Nearly two in five lawmakers in the U.S. House, 39%, have served for less than three years, according to data compiled by the non-partisan Cook Political Report. It’s the least experienced House since at least 1995, when an election wave swept the Republicans into power.

Read the rest of the USA Today articleĀ here.

That was just four years ago. The turnover on Capitol Hill has continued at about the same pace.

It brings to mind the Congress that took office in 1995. The election the previous year had swept out dozens of incumbents as the Republican insurgents took control of both legislative houses for the first time in 40 years. One of the upstart freshmen that year was a young self-described “recovering lawyer” named Mac Thornberry, who became the Texas Panhandle’s representative.

Thornberry, a Clarendon Republican, is still in the House. He campaigned as a champion of the Contract With America, the GOP platform that pledged a lot of radical changes. One of them was mandated term limits. Thornberry never imposed any such limit on himself; he has voted in favor of every failed attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to require term limits for members of Congress.

Frankly, I’ve never faulted him for remaining in Congress all this time … even though I detest his general governing philosophy.

Indeed, any member of Congress who does a lousy job or who doesn’t represent his constituents’ interests will hear from them on Election Day. The voters have the power to impose their own brand of term limits on their elected representatives.

Moreover, is inexperience a good thing when it comes to running the federal government? Hmm. Let me think about that.

Oh, yeah. We’ve got a political novice in the White House at this very moment. The president took office after spending his entire professional life seeking to fatten his financial portfolio. He had zero public service experience before taking office. He is learning a hard lesson that governing isn’t nearly the same as running a business empire.

I believe, therefore, that government experience is vital.

The upcoming midterm election is going to turn on a lot of factors. Term limits might return as a top-drawer political issue. Fine. Let’s have that debate. I likely won’t budge from my long-held belief that we already have term limits. We call them “elections.”

***

Here’s what I wrote five years ago about this very issue:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2012/10/term-limits-we-already-have-them/

 

national news

Call this guy a promise-breaker

That darn Markwayne Mullin. He said he’d serve just three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and then bow out.

So, what does the Oklahoma Republican do? He reneges on his pledge. He’s going to run for a fourth term. Term limits? Who needs ’em, right Rep. Mullin?

Actually, since I don’t believe in mandated term limits, I’m not all that worked up about Mullin’s decision to try once again to be elected to his House seat.

There’s a certain irony, though, attached to this announcement.

One is that Mullin made a foolish pledge in the first place. He says he was so frustrated serving in Congress during the Barack Obama administration that he now wants to serve during the time Donald Trump is president. He thinks he can get more done while Trump is president.

The foolishness of the pledge reminds me of how many of the 1994 Contract With America class of congressmen and women promised to serve a limited number of terms. Some of them kept that pledge, others took it back. I think of former Rep. George Nethercutt of Washington state, who defeated House Speaker Tom Foley in arguably the biggest upset of the 1994 election. Nethercutt vowed to serve three terms and then he pulled it back. He eventually gave up his House seat to run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from Washington; his broken promise became an issue and he lost that campaign.

U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, from right here in the Texas Panhandle, also was elected that year. He has voted in favor of proposed constitutional amendments limiting lawmakers’ terms. He just never made the pledge for himself. He’s still in office — 22 years later!

Back to Markwayne Mullin. This clown also declared during a town hall meeting earlier this year that the public doesn’t pay his salary. Huh? Yep. He said he pays his own way to serve in Congress.

Umm. No, young man. Not true! The public pays your salary, your office staff’s salary, and all the perks associated with your office. Why, even I have a stake in your salary, even though I am not one of your constituents.

So, my hunch is that the voters of his Oklahoma congressional district just might invoke their version of term limits — by kicking his rear end out of office next year.

ā€œWe understand that people are going to be upset. And we get that. We understand it,ā€ Mullin said. ā€œIā€™m not hiding from that. Because we did say we were going to serve six years.”

There might be a lesson here. Which is that certain campaign promises are not to be treated like something you can just toss out when you get a change of heart.

national news, State news

JFK murder recalls a curious interview

brooks-at-lbj-swearing-in

Take a good look at this picture. You know the moment it has recorded.

Standing behind the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy, just over her right shoulder is a fellow I used to know pretty well. He is U.S. Rep. Jack Brooks, a Democrat from Beaumont, Texas, and arguably the crustiest, most partisan member of the Texas congressional delegation at that time … or perhaps any time.

Brooks died just a few years ago. He was one of the Democrats who lost his re-election bid in that historic Republican “Contract With America” tide that swept over Congress in 1994.

The previous year, I sat down with Brooks to interview him about the events that occurred in Dallas 30 years earlier. I sought to get into the man’s soul, into his heart. I wanted him to share with his constituents — through this interview to be published in the Beaumont Enterprise — what he felt that day.

Jack was riding in the motorcade that beautiful day in Dallas. It was Nov. 22, 1963. He was riding several vehicles behind the presidential limo that was carrying the Kennedys and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie.

Rifle shots exploded from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, hitting theĀ president and Gov. Connally. Their car took off at full speed for Parkland Hospital. The world held its breath when news broke that “shots were fired”Ā at the motorcade.

Then the terribleĀ result flashed around the globe: The president was dead.

I sought to plumb deep into Rep. Brooks’ heart and soul that day.

But I learned something that day about Brooks that I knew intuitively all along. He wasn’t prone to thinking like that. I recall beingĀ disappointed at the seeming lack of pathos this man.

Brooks wasn’t the most gracious fellow I’ve ever met. He could be as mean as they come. Perhaps he wasn’t comfortable talking to a media representative about that terrible day.

Surely he knew, I speculated to him out loud, about the immense burden that his mentor and friend — President Lyndon Johnson — was carrying at that moment. Did he sense it? Did he grasp in the moment that the world was watching everyone’s move that day? Brooks didn’t confide much to me during our visit that day.

That interview stands perhaps as the most glaring missed opportunity I experienced during nearly four decades in daily journalism.

Oh, how I sought far more than I got from a veteran Texas politician.

national news, political news

No term limits, please

Harry Reid’s announcement that he’s retiring from the U.S. Senate is going to prompt the predictable calls for term limits for members of Congress.

I’ve heard some yammering from my network of social media friends.

Many of them favor term limits, thinking apparently that voters of various states and congressional districts aren’t smart enough to determine whether their elected representatives are doing a good job for them.

One of my pals — who I am certain echoes the views of others on the right — thinks Sen. John McCain, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and probably dozens of other congresspeople need to hit the road right along with Reid.

My friend is mistaken.

Republican bomb-thrower Newt Gingrich led the revolutionary Contract With America insurgency in 1994. Republicans took control of both congressional chambers, Gingrich became speaker of the House and Congress sought to limit the terms of its members. It has failed every time.

The one aspect of term limits that I favor has been enacted by the GOP House caucus, which limits the number of terms that House members can serve as committee chairs; Democrats ought to follow suit, but that’s a congressional rules decision.

Voters back home — including those in Nevada who’ve kept sending the Democrat Reid back to the Senate — have the right to decide who they want representing their interests in Washington.

Harry Reid did that for Nevadans. He’s now calling it a career. Good for him.

Term limits? We have them already. They’re called “elections.”

 

Uncategorized

75 mph? Hey, no big deal

1 Comment

My good friend Paige Carruth is going to flip when he gets wind of what I’m about to write next.

I’ve gotten used to driving 75 mph on our highways.

There. It’s off my chest. I feel cleansed already.

Why the change of heart?

Flash back to the mid-1990s. I was writing editorials for the Amarillo Globe-News. Congress had just been taken over by Republicans in that historic Contract With America election. The federal government had enacted since the 1970s a federally mandated 55 mph speed limit on interstate highways. We took the position then that lifting the limit was dangerous on a couple of levels.

The feds had enacted the speed limit to reduce fuel consumption; the Arab oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979 frightened us, remember? Reducing the speed in fact reduced our consumption of fossil fuels. What’s more, it reduced the number of traffic fatalities, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Congress didn’t listen to us. The 1995 Congress removed the federal mandate and gave states the authority to jack up the speed limits. Texas jumped all over it and the 1995 Legislature bumped the speeds up to 70 mph on interstate highways. I was mortified. I said so at the time publicly, in my column; the newspaper editorial policy suggested it was a mistake as well.

Paige — a retired West Texas State University administrator — has never let me forget that I am a slow-poke by nature.

Well, that was true then. It’s not so true now.

I’ve gotten used to the 75 mph speed limit. The state has since boosted its speed to 75 on many highways — interstate freeways and state-run highways.

Allow me this tiny boast: My wife and I today returned from a weekend in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, where we visited our granddaughter — and her parents. We left their home in Allen this afternoon at 1:40; we pulled into our driveway in Amarillo at 7:37 p.m. That’s less than six hours in what usually takes us a lot longer.

The 75 mph speed limit helped us set what we believe is a personal land-speed record.

It helps that one of our two vehicles is a Toyota Prius hybrid that gets stupendously good fuel mileage, which enables us to justify our willingness to press the pedal to the metal. It also helps that the little car — to borrow a phrase used by the late great Hall of Fame baseball pitcher-turned announcer Dizzy Dean — can really “pick ’em up and lay ’em down.”

I feel better already having acknowledged that driving a little faster doesn’t give me the nervous jerks the way it once did.

Let’s not talk about driving 80 mph, which is allowed on some sections of Interstate 10 downstate. And Texas 130, where they allow you to goose it to 85? I’ll leave that stretch of roadway to the fools.

Uncategorized

Congress too mean even for John Dingell

When John Dingell says that life in Congress has become too much to handle, then you know things have gone badly.

Rep. Dingell, D-Mich., is the longest-serving member in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today he announced he is retiring at the end of his umpteenth term.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/house-races/199023-report-rep-john-dingell-to-retire

For 58 years Dingell has been serving the people of his House district.

I’m trying to think if there has been a more cantankerous member of the House then Dingell. One name comes to mind: the late Jack Brooks, D-Beaumont, who served for 40 years before losing his seat in the landmark 1994 Contract with America GOP sweep of both houses of Congress. “Sweet Ol’ Brooks,” which he called himself, was my congressman and we had, shall we say, a checkered relationship during the years I covered him while working for the paper on the Gulf Coast.

Dingell is at once a poster for and against term limits. He made congressional service his career, which term limits proponents say runs counter to the Founders’ wishes. Then again, the folks in his Michigan congressional district thought enough of him to keep re-electing over the course of 50-plus years.

“I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,” Dingell said. “It’s become very hard because of the acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.”

So, another longtime veteran is calling it a career. When this man says public service in Washington has become “obnoxious,” then you’d better break out the gas masks.

Uncategorized

Term limits for all … but not for himself?

I recently chided members of Congress who have kept getting paid while other federal employees are having to take unpaid leave — all because Congress’s actions have resulted in a partial shutdown of the federal government.

I included my own member of Congress, Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, as a target of chiding. He’s still getting paid.

My criticism drew some response from blogosphere friends, a couple of whom took the argument a bit farther, suggesting that Thornberry shouldn’t even be in office at this moment, given that he ran for the House of Representatives the first time in 1994 while supporting the Contract With America, which included — among many other items — term limits for members of Congress.

I feel the need to respond to that criticism on Thornberry’s behalf.

To be clear, I am not a huge fan politically of my congressman — although I like him personally and consider him to be smart and an articulate advocate for his philosophical view of government.

Thornberry never took the pledge to limit himself to the amount of time he would serve in Congress. He espoused his support for the Contract With America, which was the brainchild of the leader of the 1994 GOP revolution, Rep. Newt Gingrich, who parlayed his party’s capturing of Congress into the House speakership. Thornberry has voted every time in favor of the term limits measure every time it’s come to the floor of the House. But because the legislation comes in the form of a constitutional amendment, it requires two-thirds of the House to approve it; the measure has fallen short every time.

Still, Thornberry is on the record as supporting it.

One of my blogosphere pals questioned my giving Thornberry a pass, suggesting that he should be more faithful to the CWA simply by taking the pledge to step aside after three terms, which the term-limits plank in the CWA provided.

This issue has dogged Thornberry ever since he took office, although the size of his re-election victories in every contested election — and there haven’t been that many of them — suggests that most voters are giving him a pass on it, too.

I have continued to maintain that Thornberry played the issue smartly when he ran the first time. Yes, he might have split a few hairs by supporting the CWA while declining to limit himself to three terms in office. Others in that congressional class of ’94 took the pledge, only to renege on it years later. Thornberry saved himself the embarrassment of trying to explain why he might have second thoughts.

As for lawmakers — including Thornberry — getting paid while fed staffers are being denied their income, well, that’s another matter. That should provide enough of an embarrassment all by itself.